20 Year Old Indian Hacker Finds A Mistake In Facebook Code And Gets An Unbelievable Reward

20 Year Old Indian Hacker Finds A Mistake In Facebook Code And Gets An Unbelievable Reward

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20 Year Old Indian Hacker Finds A Mistake In Facebook Code And Gets An Unbelievable Reward

India has a weird-ass obsession with Engineering and a huge chunk of it is covered by software engineers. It is a common notion to complete your engineering first and then follow your passion. There are so many examples where Engineers have chosen a profession that is nowhere related to their degree. And, there are also a lot of cases where careers have gone for a toss after doing engineering.

Amidst this, there are a few tech geniuses who are doing just the right thing. A few coders who are so good in their game, those software giants from the Silicon Valley can’t help but appreciate their skills.

Arun S Kumar is a computer engineering student from MES Institute of Technology and Management in Chathannoor.

You might wonder what makes him special?

When we use Facebook, the best we do is put up a display picture clicked from a friend’s DSLR camera and garner 100-150 likes. If you are a girl, probably a lot more.

But when this tech genius uses Facebook, he finds out critical vulnerabilities in its code and ends up earning 10 frikkin’ lakhs. And he is just 20.

In 2011 Facebook had announced the bug bounty programme in which techies across the globe were allowed to find flaws in the existing code and get rewarded for the same.

Arun Kumar found a major vulnerability in the Facebook Business Manager and was awarded Rs 10.70 lakh ($16,000) for it.

This vulnerability would have allowed hackers to take control over a Facebook page in less than 10 seconds.

Imagine how many businesses would have been affected if this bug was not solved. In an interview with the Times of India, the engineer shared,

“Since the hacker would be able to manipulate the page of any Facebook user, the damage it would bring is beyond imagination.”

It is not the first time, Arun has spotted a flaw for a tech giant. In the past three years, he has received about Rs 30.85 lakh ($46,000) for notifying the owners about such bugs. And again, he is just 20 years old.

The bug was detected on the 29th of August and Arun shared his analysis with the security team at Facebook. They fixed it by the 6th of September and three days later, informed Arun about the reward. That’s not it, though.

Arun was awarded the 10th place in Facebook’s hall of fame of white hat hackers making him the only Indian in the list. He was also invited by Facebook for a meeting with the security team at Las Vegas.

His achievement is some inspiration for all the tech-aspirants who want to make it big in the valley.